She who Pays the Piper Calls the Number: Reparations and Gender Differences in Fertility Choice

We study how shifting intra-household control over resources affects fertility, exploiting a quasi-natural experiment in Israel where some Holocaust survivors began receiving substantial, permanent and unexpected reparations in 1957 and others only decades later, after their childbearing years. Using a triple-difference design with heterogeneity by the wife's age, we compare fertility outcomes by timing of reparations, recipient's gender, and age. Households in which the wife was age 25 or younger in 1957 and received reparations early had 0.25--0.4 fewer children than the corresponding male-recipient comparison, after netting out gender differences among late-recipient households. An event study tracking households across the full reproductive span shows that the gap emerged only after 1957 and stabilized at roughly this magnitude by the late 1960s. A complementary within-early-cohort design compares female-only-early to dual-early households among young wives, ruling out selection into early female receipt. The estimate is similar, indicating that the operative margin is the relative shift in spousal control rather than the wife's receipt per se. Suggestive evidence shows higher educational attainment among the affected children, consistent with a quantity--quality reallocation. The findings speak to the design of individually paid unconditional transfers and child-contingent pronatalist policies.